prog | (no subject)

My continued failure to figure out how to deploy a Java application on Windows is holding up the entire volity.net website rollout, and thus delaying our search for money. I have been consistently enraged for about a day now. I have not been this angry at a computing platform for being an uncaring behemoth since the time I was forced to work with Oracle at Harvard.

I have found programs that will take my Jar and make an .exe out of it, and even some that make an .msi installer file out of it. This is a good start, but in every case the resulting program, if opened on a machine without Java installed, will not do the sane thing of silently downloading and installing Java, but instead tell the user that they don't have any Java and leaving them to do something about it.

And this is retarded. Most any non-technical user presented with a dialog nattering about unmet dependencies or (worse) thrown to an apparently random webpage at sun.com is going to include that the program is broken or virused or something, and will trash it without further thought.

Do Windows developers not know this? Do they just not care? Does working with an OS that is already user-hating in a thousand little ways desensitize you against not wanting to produce one more way?

SO ANGRY

Threaded | Flat

I ran into this kind of issue with, of all things, a Quicktime extension. We spent over half an hour trying to download the right thingy and install it before people came over to watch the thing I needed it for. I finally gave up and used a different program. And this was on a Mac. Grr.

For what it's worth, when I ran into this problem with a Windows desktop program my solution was to ship the whole Java runtime with the program, every time.

More than 2/3 of our support calls were from people with bad/old/stupid Java installs. The only way I could see around it was to install our own Java in a fine and private place that our app would use. It bloated the install by another 20 meg, but it dropped support calls to almost nothing.

I dunno if that helps your problem at all, but seriously: the world is broken in more ways than you can possibly imagine, and there is no way around it but to brute force the solution. It's amazingly ugly, but one thing my years as a pure scientist taught me is that if you give the universe any choice at all it will always to the maximally perverse thing. The only solution is to leave nothing to chance, and force the universe to conform to you will. Arbitrarily high levels of (metaphorical) violence are permitted in the course of this operation.

Downloading and installing other required components *silently* is evil. Give the user a dialog telling the user that you (the installer) need to download and install the latest Java, and give the user OK and Cancel buttons. You might recall the Mac blogs going nuts a couple of months ago when it was discovered that some apps such as PathFinder and Sandvox were silently installing Unsanity's Smart Crash Reports. One such blog was Daring Fireball which, as always, has excellent coverage of the topic:

http://daringfireball.net/2006/01/smart_crash_reports